Positano

After a rather long day of travel, we arrived in Positano late yesterday afternoon. Positano is located on the Amalfi Coast and is a very popular tourist destination in the summer. Being winter, it is very quiet with many hotels and restaurants closed for the season. After being in Venice where you could spend weeks exploring every street and canal, Positano is very small and it doesn’t take long to see all that there is to see. The town is built on a very rugged hillside and many of the streets in Positano are in fact stairs (we discovered when we arrived that our hotel wasn’t in fact on a street but at the top of a set of stairs!). Similarly to Manarola in Cinque Terre, it is somewhat mind boggling to think how the original occupants constructed Positano given such a steep and remote hillside. However, it is a beautiful place to visit and I’m glad that the first residents of Positano went to so much effort!

We spent a few hours today wandering around, photographing the sites and enjoying a bit of a picnic lunch by the water. Here are a few photographs from today’s exploration of Positano.

Apart from the beach, the only real “tourist attraction” in Positano is the church – the Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. Here is an image inside the church…

There are several mosaic artworks around the outside of the church.

And here is the Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta. The dome is made of tiles and is quite impressive to look at.

This afternoon the sun decided to pop out for five minutes and we were able to photograph Positano bathed in some golden sunshine. This image was taken from the balcony of our hotel room. As you can see, it is a spectacular view and would be perfect in summer – I can imagine spending many hours on the balcony, soaking up the view with a good book in hand. Unfortunately the weather at the moment is not conducive to those kinds of activities. I guess we will just have to come back during the summer!

Even though it isn’t summer and we can’t enjoy swimming in the crystal clear water or soaking up the sun on our balcony, it has been great to visit Positano. It is a beautiful part of Italy and the benefit of visiting during winter is that there are hardly any other tourists around.

Tomorrow we are off to the island of Capri for four nights. We will make our way to Sorrento tomorrow morning and will catch a ferry over to Capri. Similarly to Positano, Capri isn’t very big and much of it will be closed for the winter, so I’m looking forward to a bit of R&R before we head home next Thursday. I’ll be sure to post an update from Capri with lots of photographs from our adventures there.